The Way Back

The Way Back is a war drama film about a group of prisoners who escape from a Siberian Gulag camp during World War II. The film is directed by Peter Weir from a screenplay also by Weir and Keith Clarke, inspired by The Long Walk, a book by Sławomir Rawicz, a Polish POW in the Soviet Gulag. It stars Jim Sturgess as Janusz, Colin Farrell as Valka, Ed Harris as Mr Smith, and Saoirse Ronan as Irena, with Alexandru Potocean as Tomasz, Sebastian Urzendowsky as Kazik, Gustaf Skarsgård as Voss, Dragoş Bucur as Zoran and Mark Strong as Khabarov.[2]

I saw this movie opening week and thought it was a good strong B film. There is very little soundtrack which is very unusual nowadays, then I saw that The National Geographic helped make this film, so it had a bit of a documentary feel to it when the director was filming the wide vast spaces of the Siberian forest and the Mongolian desert. Since my family is from eastern Europe and had lived through some of the same experiences this film was a bit personal and emotional. Still at the very end of the film you see a montage of the rise and fall of communism that seems to be a bit of a disconnect from the main theme of the movie which is of survival. At the very end you also realize that the basis of the film is also the love of a husband for his wife who was tortured by the communists to betray her husband and sentence him to prison or perhaps it is also a story of redemption.